CIOInsider India Magazine
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Dr Damo Vedapuri
Co-Founder & Head (US)
Despite the widespread chaos that it caused globally, the COVID-19 pandemic stressed upon the immediate need for the pharmaceutical industry to accelerate their drug discovery & development with enhanced quality and efficacy.
As a result, pharma companies are now increasingly adopting cutting-edge technologies & solutions for enhanced precision in terms of mixing essential ingredients as well as maintaining the right parameters of the stirred tank.
While there are a multitude of pharma solution providers who are currently operational in the market, one software that stands-out through its sheer tech prowess and domain expertise is MIXIT from Tridiagonal Software.
Based in Pune, Tridiagonal was incepted in 2006 at National Chemical Laboratories with a vision to empower business across key industries to achieve peak efficiency and sustainability by providing innovative solutions that facilitate hassle-free scale-up, process optimization, and tech-transfer.
With over 250 cross-domain projects successfully delivered till date for 150+ clients worldwide, the company has earned the reputation of being among the most reliable and sought-after software partners for diverse industrial applications.
In a recent interaction with CIO Insider, Dr Damo Vedapuri (Co-Founder & Head – US) and Dr Gopal Kasat (Global Director- Mixing Science) shared more insights about Tridiagonal Software, its core practice areas, key offerings, and many other interesting facets. Below are a few key extracts from the exclusive interview.
Tell us about Tridiagonal as a company and the evolution of your flagship – MIXIT.
We started our operations initially as a consulting firm helping clients across US and Europe with their reactor design and optimization, but gradually
expanded into other process equipment and started building numerous software tools for them using open-source platforms to help their design process.
Upon continued demand from industry to develop applications around mixing, we built MIXIT in 2013 using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology with the sole purpose of helping business get detailed insights of their chemical processes and analyze the overall mixing and product development.
MIXIT provides users with a list of shortlisted scenarios that have maximum chances of working instead of following the time-consuming practice of trial & error
Briefly explain some of the key customer pain points that the MIXIT platform address.
MIXIT essentially addresses two mission-critical challenges; it enables users to get a clear understanding of the critical process parameters and process metrics involved in the lab scale and accordingly scale it with high precision from lab to plant so that critical process parameter of the plant reactor matches that of the lab reactor.
Also, since the reactor type varies from one plant to another, maintaining the same mixing environment in the new reactor becomes extremely crucial when shifting a process from one plant to another.
Thus, MIXIT provides users with a list of shortlisted scenarios that have maximum chances of working instead of following the time-consuming practice of trial & error. This not only facilitates faster TTM, but also reduces raw materials cost and wastage during tech transfer.
What are some of the noteworthy tech features & functions that are integrated into MIXIT?
MIXIT is a very visually driven solution that provides a detailed analysis for the users about what's really going on inside your tanks and reactors through numerous creative animations and 3D visuals.
Built with a very user-friendly graphical interface, it enables process engineers to just punchin the different parameters of their tank – such as its dimensions,
number of impellers, speed, and volume – and just within a few clicks perform a detailed CFD simulation and quickly get the automated results.
Additionally, as a very physics-driven solution, MIXIT takes large number of tank and reactor configurations into consideration to produce highly precise simulations that help reduce the overall product development times with heightened quality, thus justifying the Tridiagonal’s mission of enabling businesses to ‘Get it right the first time’.
Most importantly, the simple UI of MIXIT also enables users to easily create a digital twin of their mixing reactors even without any 3D or CAD knowledge, perform a variety of simulations to eliminate negative scenarios and accelerate the TTM of their products.
Dr Damo Vedapuri, Co-Founder & Head (US)
What does the future hold for Tridiagonal in the coming days?
While MIXIT provided the first level of automation, our process analytics platform Sim Sight will provide the next level of guided workflows and automation to facilitate specific end user application enabling faster problem solving.
Till date, we’ve conducted a large number of simulations using CFD technology through MIXIT and built a vast database of pre-characterized information such as the reactor’s mixing performance capabilities, to which we’re applying AI/ML techniques now to drive faster decision making for businesses.
Thus, going forward, our primary focus will be around strengthening our ML capabilities to help companies seamlessly integrate their lab data and associated synthetic data to predict and control plant performance with simplified work flows, in turn accelerating the TTM.
Additionally, we’re also in the process of building tools that will enable users to derive insights from the simulation data, develop better process knowledge and combine the process data with running plan data for runtime guidance and improving the overall proves efficiencies.
